Local Authority level mortality data
Introduction
Simon Woods makes a very convincing statistical case here https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.02090 that case numbers were declining prior to the lockdown in the UK. The most baffling aspect of this is why there was no evidence of a gradual ramp up of mortality prior to the lockdown. The spatial pattern is even harder to explain. Why did lockdown not stop the spatial spread?. To illustrate the fact that the lockdown very clearly did not I have plotted (using polygons with size proportional to the population to show the local authorities) the time to the first death reported from each LA in England. By the fourth week of lockdown every single local authority had reported at least one covid death. However travel restrictions were in place. This suggests that the virus was already present throughout the whole country prior to lockdown. Would imposing lockdowns just a week earlier have changed anything at all?
Local authorities with covid deaths
Before 23 March 2020
Week 1 lockdown March 2020
Week 2 lockdown April 2020
Week 3 lockdown April 2020
Week 4 lockdown April 2020
Time to first death against total number
According to the Guardian “A retired company secretary from Chatham, died on 30 January 2020 at Medway Maritime hospital. A postmortem report completed last August based on retained samples from his lungs found that “the underlying cause is due to Covid-19 infection”. The first officially reported death was on 5 March in Reading at a time when number of known cases was reported to be 118. The Lombardy lockdown began two days later, after a period of two weeks in which case numbers had been reported to be rising. If lockdowns stopped the spread of the virus then the local authorities reporting the earliest deaths might be expected to show a higher final death toll than those that reported their first deaths after the lockdown began.
The statistical relationship is not significant with p = 0.13 and adjusted R squared of 0.00391. Over 1 million people lived in the local authorities that reported a covid19 death prior to the official lockdown. Medway ended up with close to the mean number of deaths per head of population.